In my nutrition and functional medicine clinic, in Worcestershire, a vast majority of my clients suffer with anxiety. In the main, a large factor of their anxiety is their health. It is weighing on my mind. At the moment, with the threat of an unknown, infectious and fatal disease, anxiety levels are likely high for those who’ve never had anxiety before. Dramatically so for those with pre-existing anxiety. Anxiety is typically brought about by fear and feelings of loss of control. Both with the threat of the disease, the lack of an obvious solution, or vaccine, or treatment, as well as a very real threat to the economy, loss of jobs and earnings, both fear and lack of control are likely at their highest levels right now. I have also touched on this in my blog regarding despair.

Indeed many are claiming the social contagion is greater than the physical contagion of SARS-CoV-2. The R0 is a figure you might have heard of, used to describe how many others an infected person infects. For influenza the R0 is just over 1. For SARS-CoV-2 the R0 is about 2-3. So for each person with flu, they infect one other person. For each person with covid, they infect 2-3 other people. Whilst this doesn’t sound dramatically different, if you imagine that passed through 4 stages of transmission, the flu will have reached a cumulative total of 5 people, whilst the covid will have reached a cumulative total of up to 121 people.

Consider then what the R0 of social media and the internet might be? Consider the panic during the 1919 Spanish flu, where their panic or anxiety might spread person per person. Now, in 2020, if you have panic you can share your concerns on the internet and spread it to more. You can, and likely will, indulge in internet research and find yet more to panic yourself, to drive your anxiety. The viral load of your worry and anxiety is exceptionally higher than that suffered a century ago.

Anxiety such as this can lead to many addictions. I’m not suggesting we’re all going to take up class A drugs, but rather that we will become, or have become addicted to mechanisms that help us try to manage this anxiety. For example, are you more glued to the news than normal, do you find yourself checking for news updates numerous times throughout the day? Or perhaps finding your usual resilience weaker than before reaching for chocolate or crisps during an evening slump. Or maybe you’ve noticed the number of bottles in the recycling following the same hockey stick shaped curve that indicates exponentiality?

As a nutritional therapist you’re probably going to expect me to lay down draconian laws, expecting you to use willpower to avoid these addictions, but that would be the least successful course of action. I know only too well that addictions are not a sign of a weak character. The hormones that regulate the body, including those that drive you to follow rewarding behaviours, are far stronger than any amount of willpower can ever be. They were designed to drive you to seek out food when hungry, information to help you adapt to your environment. They just have become damaging in today’s calorie, information, notification and access rich society. Therefore, expecting anyone just to give up would result in then expecting them to fail.

However, here are a few mechanisms that can help.

Whilst I don’t expect you to rely on willpower, it is kind to your willpower to reduce temptation. Be conscious of what will tempt you and have it out of sight, ideally out of the house, but at least less accessible. Every time that you see chocolate, or wine, or crisps, or social media you have to use micro willpower to not succumb, even if you don’t realise you are tempted. So keep it out of sight and you won’t have such a cumulative need for willpower each day. This can be having chocolate out of sight, wine kept outside in a shed, social media apps on the final screen of your smartphone, news headline notifications turned off. Maybe allow yourself to check the news morning and night, only twice a day. You don’t need information more frequently than that.

When feelings of anxiety creep up, or perhaps you notice it as an evening craving for whatever your poison might be, a technique you can use is to recognise it and to try to feel where in your body you feel it. Is it on the left of the right of this part of your body? Is it to the front or the back of the body? Closer to the centre of the body, or perhaps nearer the surface? How does the sensation feel? Does it change as you consider it? Perhaps it moves from place to place? Perhaps it disappears? Is it always in the same place when you feel anxious or do different subjects of anxiety bring it up in different places? This sort of contemplation brings about curiosity, and curiosity didn’t kill the cat, it kills anxiety. The mechanism is that it brings about use of your more thinking pre-frontal cortex part of the brain, rather than the panicking amygdala and calm can resume. This is why self-help books work, they bring about curiosity without hiding from the anxiety. They instigate control over something that seems uncontrollable.

As Abraham Lincoln clearly recognised, when we are kind to others we are kind to ourselves. There is no doubt that spreading kindness benefits the donor as much as the receiver. It’s not the perceived give and take, but rather give and receive.

Try to find opportunities to give, to help others, to care for people. Put a notice up on the village pin board offering to collect groceries, or medications. Contact friends and family to make sure they’re ok. Make connections. Sign up to help the NHS, or other local charities. Even if you are self-isolating or in a vulnerable category, there are things that you can do to help, by making phone calls, talking to lonely people to ensure they’re ok.

I purposefully used this heading for its dual meaning. Firstly, aim to get out in nature as much as possible.If you can’t, look out of your window at a tree, or the sky, or watch a bird flying by. I touched on this in my blog on exercise. Rarely has being surrounded by nature induced greater anxiety than being away from it. Aim to do this as a gentle mindfulness exercise several times a day. Ideally get out there, maybe barefoot, to feel the sensation of squelchy mud between your toes, the prickle of thistle underfoot. Concentrate on those sensations in your feet. Anxiety is never held in the feet, so contemplating this part of your body will help it dissipate.

And for the alternate meaning, aim always to be authentic. There is nothing more anxiety-inducing than living a lie and being someone that is not the real you. With every comment or action or attitude that you show to the world, question if this is really you. Consider that post you are planning on sharing on Instagram where the façade of perfection may give you delight but is unreal, and swap it for the more genuine post of the child tantrumming, the food thrown over the room, the husband picking his nose, I can guarantee the connection you will get back from friends will be more real, more heart-warming than anything plastically unreal will ever induce.

There is no doubt that foods can cause anxiety. When I eat too much sugar, or gluten, it takes me about 3 days to park my anxiety at the door. These foods are inflammatory, both in the gut and it’s HS2-linked brain. The digestive tract and the brain are linked by several mechanisms allowing 2 way communication of both super high speed and generalised slower but longer-lived speeds. Therefore, those foods that cause trouble in the digestive tract can also cause trouble in the brain, whilst those that are soothing to the gut are soothing to the brain. For anyone that wants to geek out on this, there’s a great book by Emeran Mayer, MD called The Mind-Gut Connection. So eliminate the inflammatory sugars, grains and dairy foods and concentrate on oily fish, which actively reduce inflammation, a rainbow of coloured vegetables and berries that provide nutrients that enable optimal brain function.

I feel strongly that you cannot out-supplement a bad diet. The good diet has to be the foundation upon which optimal health is built. Once that is in place, ensuring adequate provision of a complex of B vitamins will enable glutamate to convert to GABA which is a calming neurotransmitter, whilst also ensuring the provision of serotonin, the happy hormone. If you can’t eat enough oily fish for dietary reasons, supplement with an omega 3 fatty acid, from wild-caught fish or algae if vegan. If you take collagen as a supplement, whilst it is great for the skin it can impede the absorption of tryptophan which converts to serotonin and then to melatonin, the hormones involved in happiness and sleep. So if your mood and sleep are suffering, consider pausing collagen peptide supplementation.

Guess what? I’m always at home at the moment! My clinic is fully functioning, but virtually, using video call within my secure portal, and it’s all working like German clockwork. So, if you would like to have a chat about anything – your health concerns or health interests, please email me at kate@kateberkeley.co.uk or have a look at the rest of my website to get a feel for what I do and how I practice or read more about me.